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Just last night I was thinking about how much of my life is wasted watching advertising on TV. 15 minutes is worth more than a few dollars to me. I was watchin

Just last night I was thinking about how much of my life is wasted watching advertising on TV. 15 minutes is worth more than a few dollars to me. I was watching a movie on the Roku Channel. Because the channel is free, it's got commercials. The more I watched, the longer the commercials got. At some point I gave up and turned it off. The movie is 132 minutes long and there are 10 stops for commercials. The last commercial was 2 minutes. I'd rather pay for a subscription than watch commercials and I will definitely not pay for a channel AND watch commercials.

cwkoss 5y ago
We need to start a collective action where audiences punish advertisers. How can we lower the ROI on advertising as a society? Harass customer service lines with complaints about the advertisements? Organize focused boycotts of worst offenders? Form a journalistic non-profit that investigates unethical and illegal business practices, ordering targets by ad spend? Maybe we should mock friends and acquaintances that purchase things that are advertised in annoying or manipulative ways. Ads are stupid, and being influenced by them should be socially embarrassing in the same way that participating in MLMs is.
- recursive 5y ago
  IMO The only plausible way to do this is stop consuming media that has ads present.
- notreallyserio 5y ago
  I guess contacting sales as a merchant with questions about why products aren't meeting expectations set by commercials could help, but it'd have to be a lot of people calling to make a dent. I doubt CS calls will amount to anything, they'll just add more computer voice layers. Maybe sending activist investors to company meetings would get headlines, but I dunno if anything substantive would come of it.
- ivank 5y ago
  We could try to make competitive web services that are not funded by advertising.

cwkoss 5y ago

We need to start a collective action where audiences punish advertisers. How can we lower the ROI on advertising as a society? Harass customer service lines with complaints about the advertisements? Organize focused boycotts of worst offenders? Form a journalistic non-profit that investigates unethical and illegal business practices, ordering targets by ad spend? Maybe we should mock friends and acquaintances that purchase things that are advertised in annoying or manipulative ways. Ads are stupid, and being influenced by them should be socially embarrassing in the same way that participating in MLMs is.

recursive 5y ago
IMO The only plausible way to do this is stop consuming media that has ads present.
notreallyserio 5y ago
I guess contacting sales as a merchant with questions about why products aren't meeting expectations set by commercials could help, but it'd have to be a lot of people calling to make a dent. I doubt CS calls will amount to anything, they'll just add more computer voice layers. Maybe sending activist investors to company meetings would get headlines, but I dunno if anything substantive would come of it.
ivank 5y ago
We could try to make competitive web services that are not funded by advertising.